Interval Ear Training

In this episode, Greg Ristow and David Newman talk about the value and role of intervallic ear training, why it's time to move beyond Here comes the bride, and ways of teaching intervallic hearing that build fundamental skills for sight singing and dictation.

Links:

Karpinski, Gary. "A Cognitive Basis for Choosing a Solmization System," Music Theory Online, Vol. 27, No. 2. June 2021. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.2/mto.21.27.2.karpinski.html

Transcript

[music]

0:00:21.2 Gregory Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the Creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.

0:00:35.5 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University. And I write code and create content for uTheory.

0:00:43.4 GR: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow. I conduct the choirs at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and I'm the founder of uTheory.

0:00:49.9 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, send them our way by email at notes@uTheory.com, and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

0:01:01.7 GR: So today we'll be talking about interval ear training. And interval ear training is central to many teachers' and textbooks' approaches to sight singing and dictation. But the title of this episode is maybe a little bit misleading because research in music cognition suggests that for most common aural skills, ear training tasks we process notes by their relationship to a tonic or by their position in a scale rather than by actually hearing adjacent note to note intervallic relationships. So in our conversation today, we'll look at this research on how we hear and the role that intervals play in that hearing. We'll talk about why classic techniques we're teaching intervals can actually undermine students' reading skills. And we'll look at ways of teaching intervals that instead compliment and strengthen students' aural skills. It's a lot to get through in the course of an hour. [chuckle]

0:02:03.2 DN: It is.

0:02:04.5 GR: But David and I have agreed to play particular roles on this. So I'm going to, I'm gonna be sort of the the playback, keep us on track role and David's gonna be the the color commentary, [chuckle] role.

0:02:14.0 DN: Playing to our strengths.

0:02:15.4 GR: Playing to our strengths for sure, for sure. It is hard to talk about or even to think about how we hear, so much of how we hear music is really innate, that we don't, especially for someone with a well-developed ear, "how do I know how I know what I'm hearing?" is a hard question to answer.

0:02:40.1 DN: Yeah.

0:02:40.8 GR: And fortunately we have scientists and researchers who've been looking at exactly this question for a little, I don't know little over 40 years now. And what they have pretty consistently found is that when someone who is experienced in a particular musical culture, and so let's say broadly Western music, music that exists within the notes on a Western piano.

0:03:17.7 DN: An equal tempered scale.

0:03:19.2 GR: Yeah. A tempered major-y minor-y or rotation of its scale as opposed to for instance, some of the Turkish collections that have more notes in the scale than we have and notes that don't exist on our piano. So when someone is encultured in a musical system, when first they start hearing notes, the primary thing that their brain does is seek to determine a central pitch, what we would call a tonic and that's known in music cognition as the primacy hypothesis. The idea being that David, if I throw a few notes at you, before you're going to do anything with those notes, your mind is going to say, "what could potentially be tonic given these notes?" And we're gonna hold onto them.

0:04:20.8 DN: We contextualize it.

0:04:22.5 GR: Exactly. We seek to find the context in which that's occurring and will tend to hold onto our belief of that central note as long as we reasonably can even through the first few notes that contradict it.

0:04:39.1 DN: Yeah. I even think this is central to so much of why we enjoy music. And so if you enjoy music, you probably do this.

0:04:47.8 GR: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And it should be said we're saying this and let's just imagine that if I'm someone with really strong absolute pitch. And even in those cases although yes, someone with absolute pitch will know immediately, yes I'm hearing these particular letter names. They are also still working to contextualize them within some sort of tonal framework. If that's something that you're interested in reading about, one of my favorite articles on this is by Gary Karpinski and it's his, it just came out a couple of years ago in Music Theory Online. We'll put the link in the show notes, but this is freely accessible online and it's "A Cognitive Basis for Choosing a Solmization System." And in the first, I don't know, 15 or so paragraphs of it Karpinski goes through and just summarizes all of the research that has occurred over the past 40 years to this.

0:05:53.0 GR: And the big conclusion that he lists there is, and I'm gonna quote here, "These studies and observations lead to the conclusion that while attending to the pitches of tonal music, the first and most fundamental process listeners carry out is tonic inference. And from that, we can conclude that the single most immediately knowable tonal characteristic is the tonic." Now, what does all this have to do with intervallic ear training? What it really comes down to is this question of how do we actually hear music? And we really hear music based on how the notes relate to a sense of tonic. And we don't actually hear music based on the pitch relationship of immediately adjacent notes or even of vertical notes sounding together.

0:06:45.6 DN: And in fact, I know even for myself that if I'm singing a tonal melody I probably could very easily tell you what generic intervals I'm singing at any given time, but I would have to stop and think about what specific intervals. And when I say generic intervals, I just mean, I could tell you that I'm singing a 5th. I could tell you that I'm singing a 6th, but 6th especially, I would've to stop and think for a second to tell you what quality of 6th that was that I was singing, because I'm just going between notes in the scale.

0:07:24.5 GR: That's right.

0:07:24.9 DN: That's the simple thing. And to add intervals to that would be an additional step for me.

0:07:31.3 GR: A really great example of this is to even, to ask someone who believes they're sight singing by intervals, to take a song they know and to sing that song on the specific intervals of the song. Sing the Star Spangled Banner on specific intervals. And you get. First note, obviously, Unison. 'Cause you have nothing before. So unison, minor 3rd, major 3rd, major 3rd, minor 3rd, perfect 4th.

0:08:02.7 DN: Major 3rd, major 2nd, major 2nd. Oh gosh. Yeah, that would be a minor 6th. [chuckle] Oh, whole step, half step.

0:08:21.4 GR: Yeah. It is not how we hear. On the other hand, as you said, I think totally, yeah, very often we're we're of, oh yeah, I'm singing a 3rd, I'm singing another 3rd. Those two thirds were different, right? But, to us...

0:08:40.2 DN: They were thirds in the key.

0:08:42.3 GR: They were thirds in the key. Yeah. And as we've talked about on a number of previous episodes, our musical notation system reflects this. Our staff system with its use of key signatures is designed to show us very quickly, generic intervals, interval distance within a key and not specific interval distance or chord quality. It's really... It makes primary, this idea of our seven note key collections.

0:09:11.8 DN: Yeah. It was designed for tonal music.

0:09:15.6 GR: Because that's what it reflects.

0:09:16.6 DN: That's what music was. [laughter]

0:09:18.8 GR: Yeah. And largely still is.

0:09:21.5 DN: Yeah.

0:09:22.5 GR: And what we're getting to here is two approaches to learning and thinking about intervals. Intervals in the context of a key, which throughout this episode we'll refer to as contextual interval hearing and intervals as pure relationships between any two notes or what we'll call acontextual interval training. And if we look at the classic way intervals are taught, which I've started to call the naive approach to teaching intervals. It blends these two, it blends contextual and acontextual interval hearing without being explicit about which is which, which can lead to some real problems.

0:10:08.2 DN: Yeah.

0:10:09.9 GR: So what I mean by the classic or naive approach is the approach of saying, okay, a perfect 4th is "Here Comes The Bride." And of course, "Here Comes the Bride" comes along with context. Because it's 5, 1, 1, 1. And there are six perfect 4ths within our diatonic collection, and they don't all feel like 5, 1 and they can feel very different than that.

0:10:33.5 DN: I have a song about that. [laughter]

0:10:34.9 GR: Yeah. [laughter]

0:10:35.4 DN: We should... Yeah. That should go in the show notes too. There's an interval song as specifically about 4ths actually.

0:10:44.7 GR: That's...

0:10:45.0 DN: Some say that ascending 4th sound like, "Here Comes the Bride," but change the context and that perfect 4th may not sound the same and your song won't help as planned [laughter]

0:10:56.9 GR: Shall we just take a moment and pause and listen to it? 

0:11:00.0 DN: Oh sure.

[music]

[laughter]

0:12:18.0 GR: Yeah. And that's exactly it. That they... That these 4ths are very different. And so let's now carry that o